Curtiss had to battle would-be monopolists during aviation's early days

Posted: Sunday, September 29, 2002

Today, whooshing along 30,000 feet above the earth, marveling at the skyscape sliding by and savoring our complimentary bags of three peanuts, we forget how recently human flight was the province of crackpots, the wildest of dreams.

Curtiss was a wonder. After busting speed records atop his newfangled motorcycles (and inventing the handlebar throttle control), he looked upward, within a few years making imperishable contributions to aviation. He made the first public flight in the United States and the first flight from one American city to another. He made and sold the first commercial airplane and received the first U.S. pilot license. He designed and built the first airplane to cross the Atlantic. Many of Curtiss' inventions are still in use -- among them wing flaps, retractable landing gear, the enclosed cockpit and the design of pontoons used on seaplanes. Most of the Wrights' designs were far more ephemeral, becoming obsolete a decade after their epochal first flight.

The Wrights hated Curtiss. Obsessed with secrecy, they sought a monopoly on the skies, suing anyone they thought had infringed on their patents. After realizing the centuries-old dream of lifting above the earth, they showed their invention to practically no one for four and a half years. They even painted their early "Wright Flyer" gray, making it harder for competitors to photograph. Launching nearly three dozen lawsuits against Curtiss and others, they significantly hindered the fledgling U.S. aviation industry, their legal wrangling splintering the field into factions and siphoning energy away from technological innovation.

Bloodied but unvanquished, Curtiss, in the end, simply built better airplanes than the Wrights. Taciturn and uneasy with adulation, he emerges here a Gary Cooperish figure, drawling "aw shucks" as he outworks and outthinks his rivals, then offering them a gentlemanly hand as he picks them up from the dust. On these pages he's the plucky innovator, openly sharing his fertile ideas, while the Wrights, evil would-be monopolists, hiss and slither past in the background.

Shulman's portrayal of Curtiss as an under-appreciated pioneer, while plausible, hits headwinds from time to time; the author's prose (too many clunky sentences, a jarring, recurrent use of the present tense) occasionally tempts us to toss the book earthward. We note inexplicable gaps; the last decades of Curtiss' life, for instance, are glossed over. Sometimes, too, the halo around the man's head shines a bit too brightly; we sniff more than a whiff of hagiography.

Ultimately, though, Shulman makes a reasonably persuasive case that some canonical aviation history, long wrapped in airy mythology, could use a more thorough grounding in facts.